The odds were not against Sue Falsone, the Dodgers’ head athletic trainer/physical therapist and the most unlikely celebrity in camp, as she rose to the top of her profession.

Here are the exact odds: The National Athletic Trainers’ Association has more than 30,000 members worldwide and 52 percent are female.

Certainly by 2012, one of those thousands of women would have become the head of her department for a major pro sports team, right?

Not so fast.

Flip the calendar back to Don Mattingly’s playing career, from 1982-95. Would he have had a problem working with a female trainer?

“I don’t know,” the Dodgers’ manager said.

How about when Dodgers catcher Matt Treanor began his professional career in the mid-1990 s? Would a female trainer have been readily accepted then?

“I would say no, in all honesty,” he said. “It probably would’ve been fine after a certain amount of time.”

What about in 2002, when Aaron Harang broke into the majors? “I really don’t know how guys would’ve reacted,” the pitcher said, “because it definitely is a different atmosphere.”

Today, seemingly anyone in a Dodgers uniform said Falsone’s gender is not an issue. That marks a change for a tradition-rich baseball culture that might not have been ready for it until recently.

Just ask the players who have been around the longest, or the myriad strangers who reached out to Falsone after the Dodgers hired her as a full-time employee Oct. 31, 2011.

“I’ve gotten hundreds,” she said, “whether it was letters that were written, Facebook, emails – whatever – saying ‘I’ve always wanted to work at that level. I never thought I’d have that opportunity.'”

Sweep up the pieces from the shattered glass ceiling, and you’ll find a few more nuances to Falsone’s story.

Staff restructuring

Stan Conte doesn’t like the direction baseball injuries are headed.

A study published last year in the American Journal of Sports Medicine found player injury rates jumped nearly 40 percent after 2005.

Conte had his own anecdotal evidence after spending the previous five years as the Dodgers’ head athletic trainer (and head of medical services), and it pointed in the same direction.

“Overall as an industry, injuries are not going down,” he said. “If you think things are fine, you don’t make changes. If you think things are not going in the direction you want, you make a change.”

So Conte’s duties were restructured: He would become the team’s head of medical services in a front-office role that would allow him to oversee the team’s minor-league players as well. To do so, he needed a head athletic trainer and physical therapist to work specifically with players on the 40-man roster.

He had the perfect candidate in mind. The trouble was, Falsone already had an established job with Athletes Performance, an independent training/nutrition/therapy center based in Arizona with clients ranging from pro sports teams to national Olympic teams.

“I was their seventh employee,” she said. “I think we’re over 150 now.”

Because the Dodgers were an AP client, Falsone had worked with the team in some capacity since 2007, attending about 100 games in 2011 by her own estimate. But because she also worked with athletes in a variety of sports, Conte liked her background.

“She looks at baseball injuries from a different perspective,” Conte said.

“I was more concerned with convincing her to take the job than I was about the gender issue.”

Falsone came with a strong endorsement from within the Dodgers’ clubhouse: Right fielder Andre Ethier was among Falsone’s first clients in 2002, when he was playing for Arizona State University and she was working full-time for AP.

“I’ve spent almost every off-season with her, seeing her, doing work with her,” Ethier said. “I was more than ecstatic to hear that she was brought on to the staff, to have someone that has been very instrumental in my career, helping me stay on the field and getting back in shape every off-season.

“This was a great opportunity for her and a great opportunity for this team to get someone of her caliber here.”

Glass ceiling

The term “trainer’s room” is an ill-defined metonym, used as a catch-all phrase to describe where injured players go.

The room itself features staff members from very distinct backgrounds – namely, athletic trainers, physical therapists and massage therapists.

The Pittsburgh Steelers were the first team in any sport to hire a female athletic trainer, Ariko Iso, in 2002. The San Diego Padres broke ground by hiring a female massage therapist, Kelly Calabrese, in 2003.

Their presence went mostly unnoticed; one exception came in 2006 when a broadcaster said during a New York Mets-Padres game that women “don’t belong in the dugout.”

The broadcaster, Keith Hernandez, was subsequently reprimanded by SportsNet New York.

The Dodgers last year made Nancy Patterson the first female athletic trainer of any rank on an MLB staff. She still serves as the team’s assistant athletic trainer; Patterson and Falsone give the Dodgers the first pair of female trainers on one staff in MLB history.

So where are all those women plying their trade, if not on major professional sports teams? These days, it’s everywhere else – namely colleges, high schools and private companies. For some baseball players, the highest level may be the only one in which they haven’t encountered a woman in the trainer’s room.

“I’ve worked with female therapists in offseason rehab programs, stuff like that,” Treanor said. “That’s why it wasn’t an issue to me.”

Changing the rules

Still, even Treanor had a question when he came to his first spring training with the Dodgers in February.

“Can I be myself in the clubhouse? She made it a point to bring it out that this is our space, and she respects that,” he said.

For Harang, also a newcomer to the organization, having a full-time female trainer meant 2012 would be different from any of his first nine seasons in the majors.

“You are going to change how we react to things, and the way we go about things in the clubhouse,” he said. “You don’t say things with her around. That’s just mutual respect. Treat her with respect, she’ll treat us with respect. We don’t want to make her feel uncomfortable and she doesn’t want to make us feel uncomfortable. We’re going to be around each other all the time.”

Treanor said a player has two choices.

“You can either accept it and – bring her into the group, or shun her and be the complete idiot, bigot, or whatever you want to call it,” he said.

“You don’t hear people talk about homosexuality in the clubhouse, and odds are there’s been some guys that are homosexual but they don’t come out or whatever. What is the difference, in all honesty? We’re here doing a job. When it comes down to it, we’re doing a job.”